There is a gripping book to be written, with the right access, about the rise of Russian oil tycoons Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Khodorkovsky and metals magnate Oleg Deripaska. The stories of their troubled younger days, their early careers hustling on the market and their accumulation of wealth in the privatisation free for all under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s are compelling.

But while Londongrad provides a decent factual account of the oligarchs' business dealings and their relationships with British politicians and aristocrats, the nitty-gritty is skimmed over – the authors note that oligarchs are notoriously litigious.

Instead, this book is more of a journalistic cut-and-paste job, full of lines such as "playground of the super-rich" and "meteoric climb up the global rich lists". Meetings "crackle like log fires" and people "jet off" rather than go. The authors quote hundreds of newspaper articles, estate agents' brochures and wine company price lists.

Most of the quotes not taken from existing publications are attributed to unnamed sources – "a close friend", "one shop assistant", "a Mayfair estate agent" – rightly giving the impression that neither author has had access to the oligarchs in question. Berezovsky and Abramovich live in the UK, Khodorkovsky is serving a prison sentence in Siberia after the virtual seizure of his oil company, Yukos, by Vladimir Putin in 2004, and Deripaska has cosied up to the Russian regime.

Londongrad's authors can't seem to decide between slavering over the oligarchs' wealth or deriding them for their gauche acquisitiveness. There are pages of tedious property, plane and yacht porn and a whole chapter called "Boys With Toys" packed with phrases such as "added missile-jamming". Then there are infantalising, unsourced quotes: "They are like children in a sweet shop," observed one employee.

The wives and girlfriends "flock" to Courchevel and "descend on the Côte d'Azur", though it is clear the authors had no access to them either. There is also a strong note of derision directed at the Brits, described as "bag carriers" for the rich Russians, with emphasis on Stephen Curtis, Khodorkovsky's UK lawyer, who died in a suspiciously timed helicopter crash in 2004.

The book does include the classic story of Berezovsky serving Abramovich with a writ in Hermès on London's Sloane Street and accounts of the murders of Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko and Robert Workman, the pensioner shot dead in a case of assumed mistaken identity with the chief magistrate, Timothy Workman, who had dismissed Putin's extradition applications for former Yukos officials.

It also includes a couple of great Russian jokes. Some oligarchs go into a restaurant and the waiter says the marble table is valuable and they shouldn't put briefcases on it. The waiter returns to find a big briefcase on the table. "It's not a briefcase," the oligarch argues. "It's my wallet."